Tag Archives: Christmas Bomber

This clip spanning a mere 11 minutes of coverage from last night’s ABC World News broadcast is quite remarkable if for no other reason that it manages to seamlessly condense so many controversial and highly-charged memes into such a short space of time.

First up to bat was more information on the Obama administration’s evolving, tougher response to the foiled “Terror Plot” on Christmas, including speculation about possible head-rolling accountability to come following the inter-agency blame game and teasing suggestions of retaliatory cruise missile and/or drone strikes against “Al Queda” Monkey Bar 101 “training camps” that might soon be forthcoming in the failing and hitherto entirely obscure country of Yemen.

This was followed by a segment called “Show Me the Money” describing how the tens of billions of dollars spent since 9/11 to beef up aviation security is still woefully inadequate to the task for various reasons… Again, plenty of blame to spread around for the “business as usual” attitude; from profit-hungry, corner-cutting airlines and persnickety civil rights groups, to witless government agencies hopelessly enmeshed in bureaucratic red tape.

Finally, the Disney network’s ABC’s suave new anchor turned our attention to the purportedly mysterious and apparently vexing questions concerning the so-called “radicalization” of lonely, gullible youngsters that we’re told is becoming increasingly prevalent in this “new age of terror.” Here the coverage rapidly evolved from the provocative but unanswerable initial query as to why “a son of privilege and education” would become a terrorist into a nullifying discussion about the merits of racial profiling.

Phew! I’d remind you that this blizzard of terra-related stuff was all crammed into slightly more time than it takes to smoke a cigarette. Is it any wonder that people these days can’t really make sense of current events or sensibly put the news in any sort of meaningful context when so much superficial information, feckless opinion and elliptical speculation is packaged in such a useless, uninsightful, and ultimately agitating format?